The Affairs of Dragons
by Le'letha
Summary: [a "Nightfall" threeshot] Dagur resents losing the Skrill to a most peculiar dragon and rider pair. And he knows just where to find dragon riders to complain to…if by 'complain to', you mean 'kidnap'.
1. Chapter 1

_**The Affairs of Dragons**_

 _ **Le'letha**_

 **Author's Note:** In case you were wondering what "Race to the Edge" looks like in a parallel world…

 **Continuity:** post- _Stormfall_ ; set shortly after the threeshot "Flashfreeze"

* * *

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger." _– J.R.R. Tolkien, wise man_

"Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup." _– Anonymous, wise guy_

* * *

 **Part One**

She and Stormfly dive, veering around tree trunks and cutting beneath wildly flailing branches as the sun flashes between the trees in irregular flickers, faster than she can really see. Her world narrows to her dragon's back as she holds on tight, and Astrid can't help but flinch as a cluster of pine needles scythes over Stormfly's head and nearly swats her rider from her back. Fortunately, the sheer racket they've all been making has chased off all the squirrels, or she might have gotten a mouthful of fur.

Still, Astrid yells in exhilaration; it tears the sound from her, chasing after the breath ripped from her lungs by their flight, weighed down and clumsier as dragon and rider are. A branch clips against Stormfly's side, and Astrid frees up a hand to pat the dragon, keeping her on course. The Nadder sprints past just as the shaking tree swings back and threatens to dislodge her rider.

A howl from somewhere in their wake makes her glance over her shoulder, and it's all Astrid can do to not fall off her dragon entirely as she laughs at the sight of Fearsome abandoning the run entirely to pick a fight with the tree.

"Sorry!" Astrid calls back gleefully.

"No you're not!" Snotlout roars as he struggles to both keep his grip on his own saddle and turn the surly, aggressive Nightmare away from something to wrestle with and possibly eat.

She's not.

"There, Stormfly!" she shouts, pointing to a gap in the tree line just ahead. "Find the target!"

Rattling agreeably, her blue Nadder friend beats her wings harder, taking them up despite the rock clutched in her claws, and makes for the much-bombarded clearing.

A scream from up ahead – make that two screams – is her only warning, and the flapping, unbalanced shape of the twins' Zippleback breaks from the tree cover, heading straight for them. Or _approximately_ for them – Barf and Belch's two heads are knocking together like rocks in a tangled bola as Ruffnut and Tuffnut try to punch each other out in midair.

"The other way, you idiots!" Astrid shouts at them, even though she knows it won't make a speck of difference. At the same time, she pulls on Stormfly's straps to slow them. The Nadder is none too happy at being brought up short, but obeys.

If those two keep that up, someone is going to get hurt. While Astrid is pretty much fine with that, she has better things to do with her week than listen to one of her crew moaning – or trying to get back at the twins for dropping a boulder on them. And that never works, as the twins don't understand mysterious things like _consequences_.

"Closer," Astrid says, even though Stormfly growls reluctantly. _To those lunatics?_ she imagines Stormfly saying. _Why?_

Wrapping her hands around her mouth, Astrid roars, "Heads up down below!" just in case Fishlegs is still on the ground somewhere, and then, " _Drop that!"_

 _Drop that_ had been one of the commands she'd taught Barf and Belch herself, since the twins' idea of dragon training had run more to the instructions _sit on Snotlout, dance,_ and _take the blame_.

Mind, the _take the blame_ trick is pretty funny.

The rock in Barf and Belch's forepaws falls spinning, punching a hole through the forest, and Zippleback and twins are past them in a very loud blink, where hopefully they'll run into Snotlout, and Fearsome will eat them all.

"Right," she tells Stormfly when the sky ahead of them is clear. "Let's try that again. Charge!"

Stormfly knows _charge_ , and she carries Astrid on her back and the rock in her claws straight as an arrow's flight, soaring over the opening in the tree cover and releasing the rock right on target.

It smashes into pieces with an audible _crack_ like thunder, kicking up shards from the rest of the rubble they've dropped on the pretend fort. Astrid whoops triumphantly.

This had _so_ not been the point of the exercise.

But _damn_ , is it fun.

As Stormfly shifts into a hover, Astrid surveys the damage. It's not like it had been _much_ of a fort – they'd thrown it together with plenty of arguing and no few smashed fingers this morning. Some of those smashed fingers had even belonged to the people who had accidentally smashed them. And anyway, the point hadn't been to have the fort resist an attack. The point had been to practice carrying supplies to it.

A couple of those crates are still visible. Well, pieces of them, at least.

What can she say? Her crew had gotten bored.

Her crew has the attention span of three-year-olds.

"Ready to come down?" Fishlegs calls up to her, emerging from the trees unscathed. He scoops up a fragment of stone and tosses it to the shambling Gronkle following close enough to tread on his heels; the stocky dragon chomps it down heedless of the sharp edges.

"No way! Ready to try it again?" she shouts back.

He shrugs. "Maybe if I feed Minnow some more she'll be happier about dropping them? I dunno. I'll bring Horrorcow next time, I guess."

His Gronkle had absolutely refused to let go of the rock, except to put it in her mouth, which had been even _less_ useful than dropping it on their pretend fort. "Right. I'm going to go rescue Snotlout from a tree. Or, you know, point and laugh."

By the time she's extracted Snotlout from the pine tree, and woken up Fearsome from his smug nap at the base of that tree despite Snotlout throwing pine cones and abuse at him in equal amounts, Astrid has gotten her breath back a little.

"We can do so much better than this," she announces to her dragon-rider crew where they're sprawled inelegantly across the new rock pile and generally not listening to her. Ruffnut and Tuffnut have finally managed to get their shared dragon turned around and are hanging upside down by their knees from the last remaining crossbeam of the fort, throwing pebbles for Minnow to snap from the air.

"If you hit her, you will meet a terrible fate," Fishlegs threatens them.

"Ooh," says Ruffnut appreciatively. "What'll it be?"

"Bugs in our tunics!" Tuffnut suggests.

"Salt in all our drinks!" Ruffnut counters.

"Tickling!"

"Ew. Having to jump on our beds until we fall over every morning!"

"That'd be weird. I like it."

"You're both weird," Snotlout chips in. "Cut it out, or I'll dunk you in fish oil and feed you to your dragon."

"Cool!" both twins shout, and start throwing pebbles at him instead.

"I think we did a pretty good job," Fishlegs says while Snotlout acts out an elaborate pantomime of wringing the twins' necks. The dragons watch him and the silly faces Ruffnut and Tuffnut are making in return, fascinated, tails flicking with interest. "I mean, the dragons have really gotten the idea of picking things up and moving them somewhere else. I think we've managed to find an element of hunting behavior that they might have understood naturally. Dragons bring food back to their hatchlings, right? And they share."

"Sort of," Astrid points out, as one of the pebbles hits home and Snotlout yelps.

"Well, true, they don't _like_ to share when they're really hungry, but they will. And as long as they know to be gentle, it doesn't work out so badly."

She shrugs. "I don't mean the drill. I mean the teamwork. Come on, people. Your dragons know what to do. They know how to fly together without hitting each other. It's us that's the problem. Stop fighting them! We're not going to get anywhere if we've got them too confused to know what we want."

"Hey, I didn't volunteer to be part of this," Snotlout complains. He manages to catch one of the pebbles and flick it back at Ruffnut, who jerks away and crashes to the ground. Tuffnut laughs at her until she grabs a handful of his hair and yanks. "You just turned up this morning and said, 'hey Snotlout, it's not even light yet! Time to get up and build a fort! Because I'm a scary morning person who chews on her fingernails worrying about people we _beat the tar_ out of.' Boring!"

"I did not say that, and I do _not_ bite my fingernails. And sure you did." Astrid glares at him. "You volunteered to go looking for Drago's fleet with me, and we all took down those ships together, so now you guys are the most experienced dragon riders I have."

There's certainly someone _better_ , but he doesn't count.

And most people on Berk would rather swim to the fog banks and back rather than actually ride on a dragon for more than a quick hop. The beasts that harassed them for centuries have become their friends, dozing on the roofs of their houses and cadging treats from Vikings who would have tried to kill them not long ago. Some dragons have been taught to help move things. Most of them seem happy to be petted and talked to. And they can get so interested in the everyday things Vikings do that they're in the way as often as not.

But dragon riding is still for crazy people, especially the way she and her friends are learning to fly, wild and swooping, fast and striking, spinning and diving – trick flying, _combat_ flying. There's really nothing else like it, to see Berk from above, and the ocean racing past beneath her dragon's wings, and the secret tops of clouds that humans never get to see.

Astrid wonders sometimes what's wrong with her, that she's so happy these days to be thought of as crazy.

Somewhere in her memory, a boy with a dragon's voice and a dragon's heart, dozing in the sun on the back of a Night Fury, opens one eye and looks at her expectantly.

But they're good, her Vikings. They're really, really good. She doesn't wake up with her axe in her hand anymore – much. Her people aren't being raided in the middle of the night every few weeks, and they've won a reprieve from the fleet and the army that could have swept right over them and crushed her home like a pebble in Minnow's jaws. She's got a village full of people who still look to her to solve every dumb problem they can think of, but who at least appreciate it when she takes the time to fix stuff for them. Compared to what her world was not long ago, things are amazing.

Oh, it's not perfect. Every so often one of their fishing boats gets pirated by one of their neighbors, and then they have to load up a longboat with warriors and sail around until they either run into the culprits and steal all their fish back – or _someone's_ fish back, anyway – or pick the most likely culprits and put in just offshore and yell insults until everyone loses their voice.

A couple of tentative attempts at setting up outposts on other islands had ended badly but with no one seriously hurt. Territorial Typhoomerangs had chased the ship's crew off the first one, and after careful questioning, Stoick and Astrid had managed to figure out that rather than heroically fighting their way back to the ship in the face of an endless horde of conquering Outcasts, that crew had actually lost first dibs on the island in a fiercely-fought (and fiercely-drunk) pebble game.

There was the unfortunate fire brigade incident, which had seemed like such a good idea at the time. They have dragons everywhere now that don't _try_ to burn things down anymore, but they flame at each other, and every so often something gets caught in the crossfire… On second thought, Astrid's mistake had been encouraging them to drill as a team. She probably should have expected that they'd put their thick Viking heads together – some of Snotlout's gang had gotten involved when Astrid hadn't been watching – and decide that the best way to practice putting out fires was to start fires on purpose. Without warning anyone.

Astrid has plenty of experience kicking dumb Viking butts for being dumb, but Stoick's blistering dressing-down of the sheepishly ash-covered culprits had been a performance Astrid had watched with awe and the feeling that she should be taking notes – or charging admission. She still has so much to learn from the chief before she's ready to take over, but at least she's reasonably sure that there's going to _be_ an island left for her to lead one day.

Unless the fire brigade ever crawls out of the holes they're still hiding in.

Or unless whatever remains of Drago Bludvist's war fleet shows up. The mad warlord might be dead, and his ships scattered to the winds, but unlike _some_ people she could name, Astrid knows that a force like that won't just melt into the sea and disappear. They have to have gone somewhere to lick their wounds.

It's sure as winter not going to be here. Astrid swears it. When they come, she will be ready for them. All of Berk will be ready, if she has her way.

Oh, Astrid has not forgotten, and she worries. Sometimes she finds herself watching the horizon again.

But she has Stormfly now, who's so much more than a pet. She has friends.

And at least they're crazier than her.

"All right, that's enough for now," Astrid calls a halt to both the drill she'd planned and the game it had turned into. "Who brought lunch? Snotlout, untie Tuffnut right now."

* * *

By the time lunch is over, which is to say that they're out of food, she's well into inventing a new training drill that has to be mostly a game – or her crew won't play – and she's tempted to tie Tuffnut to something herself.

"What are you _doing?_ " she demands, the fifth time the twins race past with their hands raised like claws or flapping their arms like they intend to turn into birds mid-step, lurching erratically and shouting to each other – something about "eating all those silly mice before they turn into people" – in between making noises like "Grr! Argh!"

"We're being dragons," Ruffnut says. "Can't you see the wings?" She waves her arms. "Rawr! Dragons used to rule the world, you know."

"Why –" Astrid starts to ask, and thinks better of it. "Never mind. Just shut up for a minute so I can think!"

Tuffnut "flies" in, flapping with great pomp, and squints at her. "But dragons talk. _You_ said so," he says past the grubby finger held to his lips meditatively.

Astrid would like whatever god put the twins here – and she has very strong suspicions – to take them back. Preferably now. A year and more of trying to get people to understand that dragons communicate in gesture and posture and emotion, not in words. That you have to look carefully, and be aware of what you're saying back even when you don't mean to. And this is the progress she's made. "Dragons don't talk like that!" There's maybe an opportunity here. "They talk quietly," she says, trying to sound completely sure.

Almost immediately, Fearsome lowers his head to the ground and bugles _I'm hungry!_ so loud that if there were any birds left to be scared away, they would have erupted from the trees like a hailstorm in reverse. Stormfly shrieks a protest, flapping her wings and shaking her heavy head.

Rather than look at the twins' triumphant expressions, Astrid closes her eyes and carefully imagines hammering a nail into one of the walls of her house, which she does whenever she gets too angry to think straight. Rather than getting into stupid arguments she just can't win, she goes home and hammers nails.

She's on her second wall.

"Just shut up," she says instead, and does her best to ignore them as they run across the shattered rock pile and start small avalanches with every pretend growl. But at least they stop talking nonsense about mice.

"All right. New game," she says at last.

"Don't you mean new boring 'training'?" Snotlout demands.

She glares at him. "No. It's a game." It's training. But it looks like a game. "Two teams. Two dragons on each team. One team gets these flags –" She holds up two scraps of vaguely reddish cloth from the bottom of one of her saddlebags. "– and the other team gets these ones." They're also red. It doesn't matter. "First team to get all four flags wins. And no, tearing your flags in half doesn't count. The other team has to have _no_ flags."

"I call _not_ the twins," says Snotlout immediately. He puts his nose in the air, risking having a pebble thrown up it. "I've been scorned."

Ruffnut sighs mistily, somehow managing to grin fiendishly at the same time at Snotlout's irritation. Astrid is pretty sure the reason Eret and his crew haven't settled down on Berk for good is because Ruffnut terrifies their captain.

And Astrid once tried to borrow their ship for an earlier vaguely sort of attack-like dragon-rider training practice thing.

But it's probably Ruffnut.

Damn. And if Astrid ends up on Snotlout's team he'll inevitably suggest they ditch everyone else and go do unspecified things in the bushes together, and Astrid will have to hurt him again. Which means…

"Oh, no," Fishlegs objects. Fishlegs is maybe even better than she is at understanding dragons by the way they move, which is to say that Fishlegs is good at reading body language and has followed Astrid's line of thought from her face. "You can't stick me and Minnow with them! Fearsome tried to eat her!"

"Just once," Snotlout says defensively. "And he wasn't really trying to eat her. She just got in the way. And would you really notice? You've got, like, seven of them."

" _Of course_ I'd _notice_! Barbarian."

"Well, _duh_."

Her crew argues teams among themselves for a few minutes. Astrid waits patiently for them to work their way back around to her original plan. Then she hands out flags and points Fishlegs, Minnow, Snotlout, and a yawning Fearsome in one direction, and seriously considers hauling the twins onto Barf and Belch by the scruffs of their necks and pushing the Zippleback to face the other direction.

Vaulting onto Stormfly's back, she calls out, "Remember, first team to get all four flags wins! Flags have to stay with you – no hiding them!" Although that would be a good game too. Maybe later. "We'll start from the shore. You start from the biggest pine tree. Ready? Go!"

"I think we should sneak," Ruffnut calls over to her as the dragons fly for the shore. Beside her, Tuffnut waves the flag happily, catching it in the slipstream from Belch's horn. "You know? We could set up a decoy, and then when Snotlout and Fishlegs attack it, we jump out and snatch their flags!"

At a gentle touch from her heels and a quick request, Stormfly has veered over to Ruffnut's side of the Zippleback, and Astrid tries to watch both Ruffnut and the thinning forest ahead. "Actually, that's a pretty good idea," she admits. "I kind of like it. What kind of decoy did you have in mind?"

"Scarecrows! Scarecrows are great! Tuffnut used to be scared of 'em, you know."

"I was not!" Tuffnut defends himself.

"Yeah, I'd believe that."

"It's not true! And I had a good reason! Ruffnut hid herself in one and woke me up by going _ooooooh_ with a candle under her face and then ran away!"

Ruffnut cackles.

"Okay, but how are we going to build scarecrows big enough to look like dragons?" Astrid ducks a branch. "We'd better be quick. Fearsome's going to track us down pretty fast, and Minnow's not as slow as she looks."

"Nah, we've just got to pretend that we're all hiding behind some rocks or something. Pull some branches around," Tuffnut jumps in, distracted.

"I was kind of imagining more chasing," Astrid shouts as the dragons soar out of the last trees and bank into a long curve around the edge of the island, "but okay. Look for some rocks, then!"

She leaves finding a good place to set up an ambush to the twins, who after all are _great_ at pranks like this, and appoints herself and Stormfly their team's sentries. After an entire Gripe Day of complaints about her "crazy dragon riders club", Stoick had kindly but firmly told her to take her "crew of brats" off to the far side of the island where they're out of earshot of the town and unlikely to crash into anyone. She would have moved them up to the old arena, but dragons just flat-out won't go there.

So they're about as far away from the village as they can get and still be on Berk, and there's no one in sight except for one of the ships they stole off the Berserkers and turned into fishing boats, its sails furled, some distance off shore. Every so often, Snotlout and his gang try to steal one so they can go be pirates.

Personally, Astrid is in favor of this plan, if only so she can disown them the minute they leave harbor and refuse to let them back on the island. He can take Fearsome, too.

There's no sign of the other dragon riders yet. Maybe they actually got all the way to that towering pine tree before turning around and coming after Astrid's team, although Astrid would be surprised, or maybe they're setting up an ambush of their own. Shallow waves lap against the rocks of the ragged shore, and a forlorn patch of early snow is being worn away by the steady breeze blowing over the island and out to sea, carrying with it bits of pine needles and just a trace of the smell of ash from the village. Stormfly leans into it, gliding; Astrid says, "Hold steady, Stormfly," and leans over to tie her red flag to a strap of Stormfly's harness, where it flaps in the air daring anyone to dive close enough to take it.

Bright colors darting across the cliffs prove to be Terrible Terrors sunning themselves, arguing and playing and eating any small moving creatures slow and stupid enough to come within striking distance. Astrid finds this out firsthand when one dive-bombs her and Stormfly to attach itself to her shoulder and present her with a badly mashed dragonfly.

"There's something terribly wrong about that," she tells it, and it burps bug breath at her.

And then the rest of the flock swarms her, which would have been bad enough without Barf and Belch hovering overhead so the twins can watch and laugh.

"Stop that!" Astrid shouts, trying to brush the silly little creatures away without actually hurting them. "Shoo!" Everywhere she looks is bright scales and flapping wings and lashing tails and careless claws. "Not _again!_ "

She's the Terrors' second-favorite person, and the first isn't here and, again, doesn't count. Out of all the houses in Berk, only hers has had to be Terror-proofed. Luckily for the miniature dragons, their third-favorite person is Gothi, who likes them back until they knock over all her bottles and jars.

That's Gothi's limit. Astrid's is when Stormfly whistles _I'm not happy_ at all the tiny pests fluttering around her and clinging to her harness and staring into her eyes upside-down from a fingernail's width away. The Terrors can harass her, but not her dragon. "Get lost!" she demands. "I really mean it now!"

And because she does, they squawk outrage and stalk off with their heads held high, which is actually pretty funny-looking when done mid-air.

"So much for sneaking," Astrid shouts over to the giggling twins. "Let's just charge Snotlout and Fishlegs instead when they find us."

"No, no!" Ruffnut waves her hands. "There's some really good hiding rocks back that way! C'mon!"

Tuffnut has tied the flag to one of the horns of his helmet so that he looks like a yak that's charged through someone's line of washing. "See there?" he points at a handful of rocks. "Those ones!"

Astrid recognizes them as a sharp-edged labyrinth of debris that shattered away from the nearby cliffs too long ago for anyone to remember, or at least not recently enough for anyone to bother mentioning to her. There hasn't been a really fierce storm here in a while, so they're all tangled up in the driftwood and mats of leaves and dregs of seaweed that clutter the shoreline, being knocked around by the wind and the waves before eventually making it all the way to the shelter of the tree line or the ever-hungry ocean. After the rain washes them clean, the rocks make a pretty good lookout post. Or a hiding place for when one is, for example, being chased by wild boars.

She'd only seen the first one, but there had been more in the bushes, and they'd all gotten mad when she'd tried to stick the first one with a spear and slightly missed. Astrid had been eleven at the time, and every one of them had outweighed her, and she'd turned and run.

The time she'd spent cornered as close as she could get to the top of the tallest rock, jabbing ineffectively at the angry pigs charging blindly into things, had not been one of Astrid's best days. She'd made her way back to the village in the dark, trudging along the shoreline worn out with frustration and the stress of jumping at every rustle in the undergrowth.

Fortunately, no one else knows about this.

"Yeah, that'll work," she admits. "Let's make it look good!"

Barf and Belch skid to a landing in the gravel that passes for a beach on Berk, and Stormfly alights next to the two-headed dragon slightly more neatly. "I need sticks!" Ruffnut announces, jumping to the ground and pulling an axe Astrid could have sworn wasn't there a minute ago from the Zippleback's belly rigging. Yelling cheerfully, she charges off to threaten the spindly trees while Tuffnut starts hopping about in the sand, treading out fake dragon footprints leading towards the rocks.

"Wouldn't it be faster to get the _dragons_ to make footprints?" Astrid makes the mistake of asking.

"Aha, and that, Astrid, is why _we_ are the masters of pranks, and you are not! Dragons have no concept of proper staging, you see." He squints at the ground, and makes an enormous leap. "The next one should go – here!"

There's nothing she can say to that. She knows better than to try. "Whatever. I'll go find us a real hiding place so we can ambush Fishlegs and Snotlout when they get here. Keep an eye out for them, okay?"

"You betcha! We can do that!" Ruffnut agrees, staggering past under a heap of pine branches. "Hey, Tuffnut, what is it we can do?"

Rolling her eyes, Astrid taps her heels against Stormfly's sides and they take off into a shallow glide again, to the accompaniment of Ruffnut's scream of outrage at discovering – again – that pine sap is sticky.

From above, she picks out the thickest clump of forest and guides Stormfly down towards it, and before very long she's found a tangled bank of trees that have grown so close together they've formed a canopy of intertwined branches as thick as any roof. It's got a good view of the rocks, and if Astrid has her directions right, it's just along the line that the other team should be approaching by, assuming that Snotlout will turn around and charge right after them. Direct attacks are pretty much Snotlout's favorite thing.

"Once the decoy's set," she tells Stormfly, who tips her head on one side and clicks curiously at her rider's voice, "we'll get up in the air again and see if we can't lead them here. Then, as soon as they're chasing us, we duck into the forest and let them fly right over us. They go for the decoy, and we jump out on them. What do you think?"

She knows Stormfly doesn't understand her words, but it still feels like agreement when the Nadder ruffles her wings and noses at her. Astrid scratches Stormfly's muzzle obligingly. "Careful now," she warns. "Let's not get anyone hurt today, all right? Even if they're very, very annoying. Let's show them all how it's done."

Stormfly follows her back out into the open, which is suspiciously devoid of twins or Zippleback, although Tuffnut's pretend dragon tracks end in scuffed-up sand that looks exactly like a dragon has crash-landed there.

"Wow, not bad," she calls out, managing not to trip over a discarded stick on her way towards the rocks. She picks it up and waves it in their general direction instead, noting that they're being impressively quiet. Usually the twins are easy to find. All you have to do is stand out in the open and say in a loud voice, "Gosh, where _could_ they be? I just don't know," and listen for the giggling.

"Okay, I found us an ambush place. You going to make those scarecrows now?"

At her back, Stormfly hesitates, whining softly. "What's wrong?" Astrid starts to ask, just as movement catches her eye, flying towards her.

Even as Astrid flinches, she lashes out with her stick, a lifetime of training and combat taking over as she moves without thinking. Heavy netting falls around her, mostly tangling against the stick rather than her. But out of the corner of her eye she can see Stormfly leaping away too late, the links of the net catching on the Nadder's spines and claws and frills. The huge net hisses through the air and falls to the ground again with a _thud_ , weighting rocks burying themselves in the rough sand.

"Oh, great," Astrid mutters, and then a _second_ net flies out and envelops them both, and then a third, thickly-woven enough that she can barely see past them all. A sharp tug on the first one, which has snared around a piece of her light armor, makes her stumble, and she catches herself against Stormfly, who is whistling a high and piercing sound of alarm.

"It's okay, it's okay," she tries to reassure the Nadder, even as she tries to struggle free of the cords. "Dammit, Snotlout!" Astrid shouts at the sound of heavy boots treading towards her. "I mean, okay, good move, but that's got to be cheating –"

"What was that?" the red-haired man with the scary grin and the bugged-out eyes says, nearly hopping up and down with excitement as he grabs the edge of the net and pulls on it, just to rub it in. "Cheating? I don't cheat! I make the rules!"

"Oh," Astrid cuts herself off. " _You_."

Dagur laughs and claps his hands, applauding himself. "Me!" he announces, posing.

 _Great_ , Astrid thinks but does not say. Just great.

She and Dagur have a long history of hating each other's guts. He'd tried to break her arm when she was a little girl. She'd stuck a knife in him instead. He'd put together a handful of yak-dung stink bombs and shot them at her out of a slingshot. She'd started filling a bucket with crickets, but before she got a chance to dump them onto Dagur's stupid head, his father and Stoick had finally worked out whatever they were negotiating, and to Astrid's great relief Oswald took his son with him when he left. She'd have _understood_ if the Berserker chief had decided to ditch his bullying brat of a son on Berk, but she would have been reallyupset.

Things have only gotten worse since then.

Now Dagur is chief of the Berserkers in his own right, and even crazier than ever, and not long ago he'd tried to invade Berk for no apparent reason but that he'd felt like it. Their dragons had chased him off, and he still hadn't learned his lesson, and the second time he'd been forced to retreat, he'd sworn he'd be back with something they'd never see coming.

They hadn't seen it coming so much that they hadn't even seen it, and Astrid had been fine with that.

Dagur makes everything just that crucial little bit worse. He makes even less sense than the twins, and he's so much more malicious.

"Dagur, you overgrown nutter!" she shouts at him. "What in the names of all gods are you playing at! Get off my island! Or come a little closer so I can –"

Astrid works her fist through the net and does her level best to punch him. She knows perfectly well he's out of range, and worse still, so does he, and he doesn't even flinch.

"Ha ha!" Dagur laughs triumphantly, which always makes her want to nail an anvil to his head. "I win your silly game! I caught you! And your dragon, too!"

Stormfly growls at him, and at the leather-armored Berserkers spreading out across the sand to gather up the ends of the net and wrap her into it more tightly. Spikes snap out along her tail, and she draws it back laboriously, fighting the weight of the metal-cored ropes.

"Drop that!" Astrid snaps at the men, but they look past her to their leader, and otherwise ignore her.

From behind the rocks, though, and under Dagur's increasingly erratic laughter, she hears a _swish-thunk-swish-thunk_ that sounds remarkably like two Zippleback tails wagging in response to a familiar command.

Dammit. Apparently it's a _great_ hiding place for an ambush. Astrid kicks herself for not thinking of that.

"Last warning, Dagur," Astrid threatens. "Get off my island right now and Stormfly and I won't come after you and set your hair on fire. Well, more than someone already did."

He is looking a little scorched, even for Dagur, who mostly looks like something blew up in his face anyway.

"Oh, you'd know about that, wouldn't you?" he shoots back, actually wagging a finger at her scoldingly. Astrid entertains cheerful fantasies of Terrible Terrors biting it off his hand. "Someone's been telling tales, hmm? Oh, I bet you laughed!"

"It sounds hilarious," she deadpans, except for the enraged tic pulsing in one eye. Someone tugs at the nets again and she shouts, " _Hey!_ Cut that out!" before setting her feet more steadily. "What do you think you're doing on Berk, Dagur? Can't even win battles that you start, so now you've got to sneak around like a coward? Real honorable, this is."

"It's a clever plan! See? It worked! You came right to me!"

Astrid picks at the nets while she rolls her eyes. "Uh huh. What do you even want?"

Dagur puts a hand to his heart – or where he thinks his heart is, presumably. Astrid will be happy to show him the actual location with a nice sharp knife. "What do _I_ want?" he repeats, pretending to be baffled. "Hmm… Let me think. Let's see… I want my ships back. I want to hang you upside down from a tree and leave you there and see how long your dragons play nice with you then. I want everyone on Berk to say sorry for laughing at me for that stupid trick with your pet dragons. And I _want my Skrill!"_

Blinking, Astrid focuses on the only parts of that she actually understood. "You want the ships, you come and take them. And what are you talking about? A Skrill? What Skrill?"

"What Skrill? _My_ Skrill! The one your freaky secret spies followed me and stole!" Dagur grabs at the remains of his hair and misses, clawing at his scalp instead. "And I want them, too!"

"Okay," declares Astrid, "now you've lost me. I mean, you lost me pretty much from the beginning of what you would probably call a conversation, and what I'd call you ranting nonsense, but let me put this very clearly so that even you can understand it."

It's hard to be authoritative with nets draped over her head and tangled around her hands, and with Stormfly only making things worse by lashing her tail and snapping her jaws at everyone in sight, but Astrid does her best, standing tall and folding her arms even if that does drag part of the net with her.

"I have _no_ idea what you are talking about."

"Don't play innocent!" Dagur yells. Which is to say, Dagur is almost always yelling, but he's really worked up, spittle flying from his mouth. _Ew_ , Astrid thinks. "I know they're here! They have to be here! They've got to be here! They ruined my awesome plan to find my Skrill and then they blew up a lot of stuff and then they ran away! And no one but _you_ lot go around riding dragons."

True, Astrid thinks.

Wait.

Not true.

Never mind about the Skrill. Astrid will worry about the possibility of there being a real Skrill out there later, when she has time to panic and people to watch the horizon for any sign of a thunderstorm. But Dagur is looking for a dragon rider that is most definitely not one of hers?

Astrid is getting a very bad feeling about this.

"And I want them! Never mind the Skrill. I'm not even mad."

Debatable.

"They are way too awesome to be working for _you_ wimps. Whatever you offered them, I'll double it. Triple it! You have to introduce me! Bring them to me! We are going to be such good friends!" Dagur actually jumps up and down a little way on the last three words, like he's stomping them into the ground to hold them still and make sure they stay put.

"Um," Astrid manages to put in, just so she's sureabout this. "Let me get this clear. Who are you looking for again?"

He grabs the net and pulls on it so that he's sneering at her close up, and she seriously considers head-butting him, since his nose is in convenient range. Breaking it once more won't make that much difference. "Duh! Your secret spy. The one with the _Night Fury_."

Of course he is.

Astrid can't help it. She laughs in his face.

* * *

 _To be continued._


	2. Chapter 2

**Part Two**

Dagur doesn't think that there's anything really all that great about Berk, except that he's not supposed to be here. If he didn't have to be here, really really have to – because honestly, did they expect him to turn around and run home instead of chasing after the most glorious creature he's ever seen? – he wouldn't be.

And there's the twitch in Astrid's eye with every step he takes across her precious little island. That's probably the best thing about it.

She's really mad, under all those nets holding her and her silly pet dragon tight; it's perfect. Serves her right for being so convinced that she's better than him, like _she_ could make an army flinch in their stupid stinking boots just by laughing at them. Or at the sky. The sky was pretty funny that one time.

But the even greater thing about Berk, the absolutely best thing, just has to be the Night Fury somewhere on it, and the savage-eyed dragon rider who is clearly a man after Dagur's own heart at last. Someone who truly _understands_ the ferocious nature of dragons and Berserkers alike, who not only understands it but _embraces_ it.

They must be so bored, working for this milksop lot. Dagur can't wait to find that man and his beast and set them free to _fight_.

He's got some ideas.

All right, he's a tiny bit mad about the trick with the Skrill. How had the rider done it? The Skrill belongedto Dagur: that was obvious. It was his tribe's symbol, his dream! And yet somehow the Fury's rider had stolen its proud and vicious heart in no time at all and turned it on its rightful master.

Dagur still gets chills thinking about it, remembering the Night Fury prowling through the clutter of his useless Berserkers who still think they can call themselves warriors. Every step had been as precise and graceful as a perfect sword-blow, as tidy as the single moment between strike and screaming. He'd reached out for it, thinking only _oh, mine, mine, I want that!_

And then the flash of blade and fangs in seamless unison, the death-black dragon turning on him in glorious defiance and the man on the dragon's back who Dagur hadn't even noticed, who had stayed hidden and plotted it all, snarling at him as fierce as the Fury itself –

 _Chills_.

And Dagur had stared, terror and wonder and rage and disbelief warring within him, in the moments before they had flown away.

He'd stomped frantically on the dazed, ringing feeling dancing through his skull like some of his warriors when they've broken into the spoils of a raiding party – an image Dagur has yet to unsee, try as he might. He'd been hit worse. All hells, he'd hit _himself_ worse by accident. He's the best at everything, of course, but every so often he likes to visit everyone else's level and practice a bit, somewhere no one can see him, or against someone he can threaten into silence later.

He'd gone looking for the Skrill he'd coveted all his life – and found it, too! – and instead here at last was someone who really understood.

Someone who finally had something to teach _him_ about being terrifying.

And maybe the Skrill had gotten away, and blasted his warriors right out of what few wits they'd had in the first place. And maybe the Night Fury had looked at him as if he was less important than the iceberg beneath its claws. And _maybe_ its rider hadn't even given him a second glance, only clicked a wordless command to his dragon from beneath a glossy black helm of dragon-scales and ridden right past Dagur like the untouchable warlord the Berserker chieftain only dreams of being.

But all in all, a mostly good day.

Dagur needs to find that dragon rider and corner him and demand to know how he does that, and where he got the Night Fury, and if there happen to be more, and if not what he'll take in trade for his beast.

And then, once Dagur's weighed him down with enough gold to outshine the Fury's fire, Dagur is going to have a nice long talk with him about what happens to arrogant dragon trainers who get in his way and dare to draw steel against him and think they can look down on him like that. He might demand the Night Fury just as a well-deserved apology.

Once he gets that Night Fury – one way or another – Dagur will be the one with dragon fangs and a knife blade at the man's throat, and they'll have a very interesting chat about who's in charge around here. He'll see reason. Dagur's sure of it.

He'll see _something,_ anyway. It'll work out.

And, well, he knows where to find dragon riders, doesn't he?

The whole way here Dagur had talked of nothing else, the Fury and the rider, the Fury and the rider, jumping from excitement to rage in frantic circles until his soldiers were flinching at every breath he drew in case _this_ particular eruption ended with one of them flailing in the ocean rather than treated to another description of how fantastic the Night Fury had been.

Keeps them sharp.

He hadn't been quite sure how they were going to find the Night Fury and its ferocious master, how he could lure out Berk's secret spies who'd followed him to what he'd thought would be his greatest triumph – see! see! didn't he _know_ they were being spied on? – but they did still have all that dragon-capturing equipment going unused…

Astrid thinks she's so clever, flitting around in the sky like she thinks she's a bird. But who walked right into his trap? Who's laughing now, Astrid?

Bafflingly, the answer is _Astrid_.

"What's so funny?" he demands, squinting at the little blond minx as she drops the handfuls of nets she'd been trying to strangle and reels back against her dopey Nadder, laughing fit to burst. "I _beat_ you, can't you see? I won! You're my prisoners now, you and your pet dragon and those creepy twins, and you have to do what I say, and I say you have to bring me the Night Fury and its rider so I can tell them how awesome they are, or else!"

Astrid waves a hand at him through the nets as if that will chase him away, as if he's not even worth swatting. No one takes him _seriously_ anymore, and he grits his teeth with frustration as she laughs. "You think –" she says, between giggles. "You think – I mean, if you can call that thinking – that –" And she's off again, howling.

Dagur can feel his Berserkers staring at him, and he glares back. "She's cracked!" he announces. "Lost her mind under the strain. Poor little girl."

"Dagur," Astrid wheezes, irritation fighting with amusement on her face, lips pulling back in a grimace, "drop dead."

"Not until you get me that dragon rider," he shoots back.

Her dragon fidgets nervously under the ropes, and pushes at her like a baby running after its mother, and she pets it. "Oh man," she chuckles. "Oh, man, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard you say. _Ever_. I mean, that's up there with thinking you could fool me into jumping into Breakneck Bog by telling me that swamp muck would make my hair shiny and then someone might think that I was a halfway pretty girl rather than a miniature troll. But this? This beats everything. Now why don't you paddle back out to your ship and go home before I get to watch Stoick drop you in the well."

"Huh?" Dagur says intelligently.

"You'll see," she says, grinning. "I tell you what. Why don't you and your lackeys here surrender like good little boys. Rather than set you on fire again, we'll all go up to the village, and you can tell Stoick exactly what happened when you got on the bad side of that Night Fury. You, uh, can swim, can't you? People drink out of that well. Having you rotting in it isn't going to improve the taste any."

Dagur doesn't quite believe in that grin. There seem to be a lot of teeth in it. "Hah! As if! _You_ go back to your stinking little village, and you find that dragon rider and tell him I'm here, and _I'll_ stay here with your precious pet dragon just to be sure you do what you're told."

The grin turns a snarl. He saw _that_ coming. "Not a chance." She folds her arms stubbornly and leans against the dragon, nets draping around her. "Or maybe I'll just stay right here. Anyone who gets anywhere _near_ Stormfly is going to end up with a face full of spikes, and I bet you get bored before I do."

Actually, Dagur would quite like to leave her there, because he's pretty sure this whole area is going to be underwater when the tide comes in, or at least very damp. He seriously considers it, gnawing at one of his knuckles, and muttering, "Hmmm…"

Her glare could melt through ice, fixed on him and unmoving, not looking around.

It's a little unnerving. Dagur glances behind himself just to be sure that the Night Fury isn't sneaking up on him.

Which would be awesome. It's probably dead silent when it moves, like a ghost, appearing from shadows and vanishing into them like fog, ready to strike at its master's command.

 _Such_ a waste that they're working for Astrid.

"Hey, aren't there more of you?" Dagur realizes, scratching at his head. He'd gotten hauled off to Berk plenty of times as a kid. Stupid sappy _Oswald_ was always running off to ask Stoick about one thing or another. He's long since taken stock of everyone who was worth noticing – not many – and a few people who just _weren't_.

Right up until one of his spies – look, he'd needed to know what sort of fight his Skrill was going to be facing – had reported that some of those useless wet kids were jaunting around on dragons just like Astrid. And then he'd started paying attention.

"That jabbering fat kid, and what's-his-name, Snotthing?" Dagur glares back at her. "You're _stalling!_ "

Snapping his fingers at the nearest warrior, Dagur commands, "Pick up the net! Get them under cover with the Zippleback! Careful now! Don't let her go! Or that Nadder, either!" To the accompaniment of all these entirely necessary commands – everyone is just so damned stupid, Dagur has to do _all_ the thinking around here – and with the help of a couple of spears, the Berserkers half-drag, half-prod their captives into the shelter of the rocks and the shade of the blind they'd built this morning while Dagur crouched in wait and occasionally giggled to himself, waiting for some dragon rider or another to fall into his trap.

He'd been hoping for the Night Fury, but Astrid is a much better catch, now that he thinks about it. She can go bring the Fury and its rider to him, all nice and mannerly, and he won't have to threaten them all that much.

Within the blind, two warriors hold swords to the necks of the trussed-up Zippleback, and its riders immediately start shrieking at the sight of him. Or they would, if Dagur hadn't ordered them tied up and gagged for entirely their own good.

The crazy twins give Dagur the creeps, just a bit. One of them is probably a girl, but Dagur has never been able to figure out which one is which. They make him feel like he's drunk: seeing double, and nothing at all makes sense. One of these days he's going to knock them both over the head and toss them to big sharks, just to shut them up.

He should have a pet shark. He'd keep it in the harbor. At least until he tracks down the Skrill again.

Something to think about.

"Not okay, Dagur," Astrid growls at him. "Not that I don't sympathize, but untie them right now, or I don't tell you anything."

"Oh really? So if I do untie them, you will start talking?"

She rolls her eyes. "Try it and see."

Dagur considers the possibilities and decides that he can always order the twins shut up again later. "No screaming, or my men start cutting off heads," he orders the interchangeable twins, who make terrible faces at him even as he gives the order to let them go.

"Finally!" one of them says the moment he or she is loose. "What's the joke, Astrid? I wanna know the joke!"

"Yeah!" the other one pitches in. "Tell it tell it tell it now pleeeeease!"

Dagur would quite like to know what the joke is, too. He hasn't said anything funny that he knows about. Astrid just started laughing out of nowhere like…well, him. But he can't say _that_ , so instead he says, "Well?" and waves at her as if presenting her for a performance of an Interesting Dance Involving Being Covered in Nets, which is probably a thing and not something he just made up out of his own head right now.

She snorts, probably at the gesture. "This idiot," she says, jabbing a thumb at him dismissively, "ran into Hiccup and Toothless. And they set him on fire some. And now he thinks they're all going to be wonderful friends."

The twins look at him and blink. They look at Astrid and blink some more. They look at each other and blink _again._ They look back at him and _will they just stop blinking already?_

And then they dissolve into laughter too, which involves much flailing around on the ground and slapping each other and choking on the muddy sand this stirs up as they try to laugh and inhale sand at the same time.

Really, why is this so funny? Dagur wonders, and then says in a way that is absolutely not a scream of frustration.

"And they're not here anyway," Astrid says in tones of profound boredom. "I have no idea where they are, so I couldn't get them for you if I wanted to, which I don't. So go jump off a sea stack _,_ Dagur."

Dagur doesn't believe that for a minute. Who would be stupid enough to let a _Night Fury_ just _go?_ And Astrid is annoying, but she's not stupid, and not that deep down she's mean, almost as mean as he is, and she's got to be lying to him.

"They've got names?" he says instead, cunningly, trying to trick her into talking and revealing where they really are. "Code names, right? So no one knows what they are!"

"That'd be cool," the twin on the right says. They might have switched places while they were rolling around on the ground, but since Dagur generally refers to the twins as "You" never mind which one he's aiming at, he doesn't really care. "We should have code names! And special helmets! I could be _The -_ "

"No," Astrid says immediately.

"And they couldn't say them anyway, stupid," the twin on the left says, hitting its sibling over the head with a dull _clonk_. "Hiccup doesn't talk," Left Twin explains helpfully in Dagur's general direction.

"That's the rider?" Dagur asks just to keep Left Twin talking. It's got the be the rider, right? Dragons don't talk anyway. Unless he missed something.

Like the _joke_.

"Yeah," Left Twin confirms.

"Because Hiccup's a dragon," Right Twin immediately contradicts.

Dagur is entirely at sea. He must look it, because Left Twin picks up the nonsense with, "He is! It's so cool! He's got claws and he flies but he can't breathe fire even though Snotlout said he could."

"He lied," says Right Twin solemnly, and they both sigh.

"Snotlout's perfidy knows no ends," Right Twin goes on.

"But you're mean to dragons, so he's not going to like you at all," Left Twin complains to Dagur.

"Yeah! Your nasty people with swords who won't let me borrow one for just a second –"

"Maybe two," Left Twin contributes.

"Or five. One of those numberish sort of numbers anyway – keep poking Barf and Belch. You're gonna make them sneeze!" warns Right Twin.

The aforementioned Berserkers with swords look at Dagur nervously, and he glares at them to keep those swords right where they are.

"Did Toothless really set you on fire?" Left Twin giggles. "That sounds fun."

"Are those even words?" Dagur demands of them incredulously. "I don't think those are even words. Uh, what are they talking about?"

Astrid leans against her net-covered Nadder's flank and smirks at him. "Oh no. You got them started. You get to sort them out."

The fastest way to do that is probably shouting. Dagur forgets that they're hiding from the other dragon riders out there and shouts, "Shut up! Make sense!"

The twins look at Astrid like this is a new idea and they're waiting for her to explain it to them, probably in very small words and maybe with hand puppets. "Are they a secret?" Right Twin asks.

She rolls her eyes. "Well, not anymore."

"Okay. 'Cause we wouldn't want to tell any secrets." Right Twin appears to be serious. Dagur experiences the very understandable urge to beat someone's head in with an axe handle. He's not sure whose.

It only gets worse from there.

"You're making this up," Dagur decides somewhat later. He still thinks that _Hiccup_ and _Toothless_ have to be code names, because no one in their even slightly right mind would name a Night Fury _Toothless_. It nearly bit his _hand_ off. And there is absolutely no way that dragons could have raised a stolen baby to grow up into one of them, because that would mean that the world was way too weird even for him.

Any dragon that stole a baby would have just eaten it, which sounds like a perfectly reasonable reaction. It's a miracle babies survive to learn to shut up at all. And dragons are _vicious._

There's no way that the Night Fury's rider can talk to it in its own language, or understand it when it talks back. Why would dragons have a language? Dragons aren't clever like people – even very stupid people usually understand words, and dragons don't.

And even if – _if_ – any of that was true, Dagur doesn't believe for an instant that the creature they're describing would be smart enough to sneak around and ruin a plan as clever as his.

"They made up the part about the glow-in-the-dark eyes," Astrid puts in idly from where she's been keeping score, thumbs up and thumbs down, throughout their rambling story. Most of the time her thumb has stayed up. She'd better not think that Dagur has been so distracted he hasn't noticed her trying to work her way free of the nets. "And about that Toothless eats people. At least, I'm pretty sure he doesn't. But they're right about one thing."

"Lots of things!" objects Right Twin, who has become Left Twin over the course of a weird shuffling reenactment of, apparently, Night Fury and wild rider fighting raiding dragons over Berk.

"Some things," Astrid concedes. "Most of all that Hiccup and Toothless are wild creatures, and they go where they want and they do things for their own reasons. Gods only know what, most of the time. And they don't like Vikings much. And _you_ probably scare the life out of them. So go chase them across the ocean if you want to, Dagur. Have fun. But don't hold your breath. Actually, do hold your breath. Start now."

Dagur stares at her while he rearranges that in his head into something that isn't absolute nonsense. _Secret_ secret spies, then. Someone who knows so much about dragons that he can live among them, that he can survive in their midst and make them do what he says!

So _that's_ how the plodding dull Berkians are doing something as crazy as training dragons!

That's even _more_ awesome. Who do Astrid and the twins think they're trying to fool?

Now he really must have them.

"You," he declares, glaring, "are lying to me. Do you really think that a story like that is going to make me let you go? None of you are going anywhere until you get me that Night Fury and its rider!"

Astrid glares back. "Idiot! Think beyond your own skull for once! If we were making up a story, don't you think we'd make up something –"

"Charge!" a voice from outside the blind yells, and all of a sudden the biggest Nightmare Dagur has ever seen quite this close is trying to claw its way in among the rocks and a Gronkle with a yelling man on its back is snapping up the debris that explodes away from the ravening flaming maw. Stones _ping_ off helmets and _thunk_ into leather armor as the buzzing dragon spits out melting pebbles like a hovering oversized slingshot.

Burning branches rain down all around them as Dagur snatches up his sword with an oath that by all rights should make the flames burn blue. It doesn't. There's no justice. "Attack!" he screams at his men, who are trying to scatter in the close quarters and not getting very far. "Dragons! Get them!"

"Move!" he hears Astrid shout, amid the chaos, and Dagur realizes that he'd forgotten to post sentries. He shouldn't have needed to! Can't his useless excuses for minions even build a decent hunting blind?

Dagur yells, "Don't let them get away!" and grabs one of the hooked chains they'd brought to capture the Skrill. His first cast misses the Gronkle, and nearly brains a running Berserker, assuming the man actually has brains, but that Nightmare is too big of a target to miss. He'd just _die_ if he missed a target like that at this range.

Probably of a bad case of Monstrous Nightmare.

The hidden encampment explodes into chaos, loud and exciting and dangerous. Dagur's kind of world! Especially because the dragon riders are outnumbered, and trying to fight in an enclosed space, and Dagur really did insist on bringing _all_ the dragon-capturing equipment his men could find, buy, borrow, or steal, and then drilling them on it all extensively, for his quest to find and bring home his Skrill.

Which he still wants. But he doesn't have any idea where to pick up its trail.

And Dagur is not going home empty-handed. Not after bragging for months to everyone in his tribe that _he_ , at last, was going to outdo all their stories and harness the mythical Skrill.

See, what the Berserkers don't realize is that there are more of them then there are of him. As long as they're scared of him, he gets to stay in charge. But he dreads the day they figure out that they could get rid of him, if enough of them only dared.

Dagur can't let that happen. He can't. He can't. He's wanted to be the chief all his life, to be a conqueror, a hero, a slayer of monsters, the sort of warrior who has stories told about him. Everyone dies in the end, even gods die, but Dagur is going to be immortal, because they're never going to stop telling stories about him, even if those stories are whispers around campfires.

Unless, one day, he can't live up to all his tough talk and fast fists, and they turn on him.

He _needs_ that Night Fury, and he needs to know the dark magic that commands it, that commands all dragons – he _will_ have that rider, too, wild creature or warlord or sorcerer or whatever he is, in chains if that's what he's forced to do!

The twins had said that dragon and rider _loved_ each other, as if beasts could understand love, as if _love_ ever counted for anything.

Well, then let Dagur only put a knife to one of them, and surely the other one will come to heel, meek as milk – yes, and fierce as lightning, if he commands them to be!

He'll persuade the man, if man he be, by flattery or force, whichever works. And the beast _will_ learn to obey.

Even men learn to obey, if they're shouted at enough, and Dagur shouts orders and insults and screams in excitement as one chain after another lashes around the Nightmare's horns and turns its jaws away, and he shouts a handful of men into jumping onto its shoulders and grabbing its rider, and he raps the hilt of his sword against one of the Zippleback's skulls so that it's turning in circles and blundering into Berkians and Berserkers alike as half of it reels.

When all the fires are finally put out – stupid branches, who put those up there? – and no one is running around very much anymore, their hiding place has been totally destroyed, and Dagur is up at least two nasty rope burns and a handful of crushed fingers. If he ever finds out who that oaf was, there will be screaming.

But he now has _four_ mulish-looking dragons and five bickering dragon-riders.

"Nice one, guys," Astrid says in tones of deep disgust.

* * *

"Found you!" says Snotlout gleefully, waving a handful of flags despite the dragon-proof chain wrapped around his legs. "Haha! We win!" The twins immediately cry foul, and they all set to squabbling. It's as if there isn't a small army of thugs standing around on the newly cleared shore, looming over them and scowling over their own wounds from where dragon wings and Viking fists had struck before their escape somehow fell apart.

Astrid really can't work out whether she wants to laugh or sigh or scream in frustration. It's the teamwork that makes them worth anything, as a force to be reckoned with. Until they get the teamwork down, it's all luck, and things like this happen.

If Fishlegs and Snotlout's attempted rescue hadn't been such a disaster, it would almost have been a relief. Some things are as sure as the tide and the moon, like the silly argument that breaks out around her. At least it drowns out the memories of Dagur's covetous, stupidly cunning expression as the twins babbled all over the place about Hiccup and Toothless. She worries for her strange friends so, having seen that look on his face.

Dagur would have been absolutely the _last_ person she would have told about the Night Fury and the feral, and all the while she'd rolled her eyes and played at calm, she'd seethed with worry for them. She knows they can look after themselves, but no one deservesto be subjected to Dagur and his crazy-weirdness – and his persistence.

He will _hunt_ them. And there's no way that Hiccup will understand what Dagur wants of him; Astrid isn't even sure what Dagur wants of him! So when they frustrate him, and when Hiccup and Toothless defy him, Dagur will not be kind.

At least now she has an immediate problem to solve. She can work out how to get her people away from Dagur, rather than itching at the strangely _exposed_ feeling of Ruffnut and Tuffnut talking so freely about the Wildfire and his Night Fury twin. She's in that story! That's _her_ story to tell, and to choose who to tell it to, not theirs.

At least Ruffnut and Tuffnut don't seem to understand the heart of it – oddly enough, as the twins are the closest thing Berk has to what Night Fury and Wildfire seem to be. It's not that the dragon-pair are closer than brothers and the best of friends, Astrid knows, but that they _need_ each other. She thinks of them as grown together like trees, twined and tangled, the galls of old wounds healed into each other, sharing sap and breath and sunlight.

Gods, she hopes to never again see anything as heart-wrenching as Hiccup trying to go on living without Toothless there beside him.

Cruel people would say – Astrid herself would have said, once – that he's a ruin of a person anyway, all the cleverness in him gone untaught. Left to rot and to spoil, like an untended garden.

But it's not at all true, as long as he and Toothless are together. As long as he's _all there_ , something sly in her says, and for a moment she knows it to be as true as blood and bone, and then forgets. Hiccup is strong-willed and wary and alert, clever and a little bit funny when she understands his jokes, and he's her friend. And if that's the ruin, then by _gods_ she wishes she'd met the man.

But alone… For the first time she'd really understood the _waste_ of him.

It makes her almost ill, to have Dagur put his hands near something as close to her heart as that. As Dagur had stared at the storytelling twins with his mouth half-open and mockery just waiting to be spoken twisting his lips, Astrid had fought back a shudder like she'd caught him peeking at her while she was brushing her hair.

She'd considered making the twins shut up, but she's not sure they're capable. And anyway, that would have just made things worse. If Dagur thinks someone's keeping a secret from him, he'll go after it like Fearsome after fish.

Maybe she should have lied to him, she second-guesses herself. She could have told Dagur that they were dark gods conjured up from, oh, who knows, a haunted bottomless well or something. That the Night Fury and the Wildfire were ghosts that hunted Vikings on moonless nights. Or that Hiccup was a Lycanwing, and that he'd bite – that one step too close and _snap_ , Dagur's life would be over, that he'd go madder than usual and jump off cliffs trying to fly.

But that's Dagur's kind of story. And Astrid won't insult her friends by bringing them down to his level.

…and the level of the rest of her friends, admittedly, who are now arguing about rules that they've just made up a minute ago. Ruffnut has pulled a carved wooden whistle from one of her pockets and is blowing it every time Tuffnut declares that Snotlout and Fishlegs have broken a rule. Did no one think to check her pockets? Or then again, maybe the Berserkers, who are looking more rattled with every whistle blast, can deal with dragons but just didn't dare face the horrors that are Ruffnut's pockets.

"Hey, what's he doing here?" Snotlout finally notices the increasingly red-faced Dagur. "We could use Berserkers as human shields? This is a way more interesting game!"

Ruffnut and Tuffnut go into an intense debate on the legality of human shields, and Snotlout seizes the opportunity to ask, "So do we get points if we set them on fire? Or if we shoot past them? Because Fearsome can do that. Either way," over their heads.

"No, you numbskull," Astrid says, making her voice as bored as possible in the hope that Dagur might actually explode with rage at being ignored. "There aren't any points. He thinks he's captured us."

Dagur finally manages to get a word in edgeways. Unfortunately, it's "Uh."

 _Peep!_ Ruffnut blows her whistle at him. He grabs for it and misses. She falls over. Astrid mentally awards them each a point.

Dagur's losing.

"I _have_ captured you! You're all very captured! Ropes! On you! See them?" Dagur screams.

Fishlegs scowls. "Of course I _see_ them. I'm watching you, mister." This last is not to Dagur but to the two men holding spears against his Gronkle. "It's okay, Minnow," he coos, gesturing despite the bonds. "These are stupid rude people. Look unamused at them."

Minnow does indeed look unamused, lowering her eyelids and glaring at the men like a yak that has just realized it's a lot bigger than its herdsman.

The Berserkers gulp visibly.

"Good Minnow!" Fishlegs praises her. "Oh, look, iron! Wait for the snack, girl!"

"Psst!" Tuffnut whispers audibly. "Points are for setting them on fire."

Ruffnut holds up a thumb and says "Yep!" cheerfully.

Snotlout scratches his head. "Oh. Why?" he asks Astrid. She doesn't miss his wink and thumbs-up back to Ruffnut.

That's not _her_ problem, so Astrid just shrugs. "He's looking for Hiccup and Toothless, I think."

"Oh," Snotlout repeats. "And again, _why?_ "

"I really don't know," Astrid says thoughtfully. Dagur looks furious at being talked around in front of all of his bully-boys, which serves him right. "He thinks they're mercenaries or something like that."

"Hell _o-o!_ I'm standing right here! With a sword! And all of you in snares!"

"What?" Fishlegs says, incredulous. "That's stupid. They're dragons. _Wild_ dragons."

"I'm stupid?" Dagur is actually shaking with rage. The point of his sword wobbles back and forth as he tries to figure out who to point it at. " _I'm_ stupid? You keep talking like this _Hiccup_ actually is a dragon, and I've seen him! He's not! How stupid are _you?_ "

Dagur settles for pointing the sword at Fishlegs, but their resident dragon scholar hasn't been the frightened fat kid Dagur used to throw scraps at in a while. He was part of that expedition that got chased off the unexplored island that turned out to be inhabited by angry Typhoomerangs. By all somewhat surprised accounts it was Fishlegs who kept things under control and kept the dragons distracted long enough for everyone to get away, scared, upset, and lightly scorched, but unhurt. He can get all seven of his Gronkles to walk at heel in a long and tidy line straight through the village like he's the head goose in the flock. Of all the dragons who live in the village, his sprawling and silly Gronkles are probably the best-behaved even though there's so many of them – except for Stormfly, of course, Astrid adds privately.

Fishlegs doesn't let people bully him anymore. He'd told Astrid once, in confidence, that if Hiccup could stare down the world and _insist_ it treat him the way he wanted it to, then surely Fishlegs could stand up to Snotlout and his gang, right? And she'd told him to go for it.

Sword or not, Fishlegs' only reply is a prim, "Well, he is."

"And just why," Dagur snarls, "would you expect me to believe that?"

"Because he does," says Astrid. "Maybe more importantly, the _dragons_ do."

"Oh, because he's so happy as one! And anyway, he's in the _Book_ ," says Fishlegs, who'd put him there.

"Are you kidding?" Ruffnut yells. She eyes Dagur closely. "He's not kidding," she reports mournfully, and blows her whistle again.

"Because," Tuffnut starts, and together the twins chorus, "That's so cool!"

Dagur turns to Snotlout, who rolls his eyes. "Because you can argue with him," Snotlout says laconically. "Or you can go along with the whole nonsense. Then you get to keep your face."

For a few heartbeats the only sound is Dagur breathing very hard and choking on it. From somewhere, Astrid hears a hastily muffled chuckle.

"Who said that!" Dagur erupts in rage, turning on his own men. "Who's laughing? You laugh when I say you can! No laughing! I want whoever thinks this is funny to step forward right now!"

Nobody steps forward, and Astrid is not at all surprised.

Dagur fumes for a few heartbeats more, maybe hoping that there'll be another laugh and he'll be able to figure out where it's coming from.

In the end, it comes from him. He looks around and clenches his fists and glares and visibly chews over everything he's just been told, and then he starts giggling.

"Actually," he shouts, "that really is funny! You really had me going there for a minute! But I know what you're doing…you're stalling again, Astrid! All of you are liars. Shut up. No more stupid stories."

Somehow managing not to hit himself with the sword, he tears at what's left of his hair and goes from rage to bewailing his sad, sad fate in the blink of an eye. "Why do people never just do what they're told?" he demands of the tied-up Barf and Belch. "I come here all nice and polite, and you guys –" He spins around and points at the dragon-riders overdramatically, like his audience of Berserkers will miss them if they're not clearly pointed out. "– are being totally not helpful. So," he declares, marching over to Astrid and waving the sword at her. Suddenly his hands are completely steady.

"I'm going to say this one more time, and then I start cutting bits off your dragons. Or maybe your friends. I haven't decided yet. _Or you could go get me my Night Fury and that rider right now!_ "

It's all Astrid can do not to flinch as he screams in her face, and there's a madness in his eyes that makes her believe him at last. And it doesn't escape her notice that he's worked his way around to Toothless being _his_ Night Fury now.

So much for Dagur being reasonable and listening to her for once in his life. She'd never really believed that was going to work anyway.

Time for a new plan.

"Okay," she says, and sees out of the corner of her eye four faces turn towards her in puzzlement. She ignores them and holds out her wrists, freed of the net still ensnaring Stormfly, but with new chains of her own. "So are you going to let me go, or do you expect me just to yell and hope they hear me calling?"

He actually says, "Hmph," which sounds ridiculous. "Fine," Dagur grumbles. He sheathes his sword and picks at the knot hastily tied in her chains. Eventually he manages it.

"Fine!" he says again. "Go back to your village, and go fetch your spy and bring him here! And don't forget the Night Fury. And then you can have your precious blue pet back. And maybe these others, unless whichever twin that is keeps blowing that damn whistle!"

Ruffnut puts the whistle in her mouth to hide it and tries to look innocent. Since this blows her cheeks out like a squirrel, and since Ruffnut couldn't see innocence with a spyglass, it doesn't quite work.

Dagur storms over to the Berserkers keeping Minnow pinned down and pushes them both aside. "Here! Take this one with you, because I'm so nice. Go, go, go! And come back quickly with your spies before I get bored."

"Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time." Astrid rolls her eyes and glances over at her crew. She's glad to see that they know something's up.

Stormfly whistles a protest at the sight of Astrid on the back of another dragon, and Astrid waves at her. "It's okay, girl," she calls out. "I'll be right back."

Damn _right_ she will be, she thinks to herself as Minnow takes off reluctantly, unhappy at leaving Fishlegs behind. She really doesn't have Hiccup and Toothless to give him – as if she would anyway! – so it's not like she's going far.

Instead she makes a big fuss about flying Minnow off into the forest, across the still-wild heart of the island and back towards the village, at least until they're out of sight of Dagur and his thugs.

"Right," Astrid tells Minnow, who rocks from paw to paw in the underbrush and grumbles in a voice like grinding stone. "Quietly now."

Minnow is thick and heavy, but she has the same careful grace as many of the oversized Vikings Astrid has been living amongst all her life. They're giant oafs much of the time, but put them in a fight or a dance, or on the deck of a heaving ship, or leave children underfoot, and suddenly they don't put a step wrong. And Gronkles are stocky, with no long tail or broad wings to snarl themselves in the undergrowth and make it rustle. She follows Astrid cooperatively, hovering like a honeybee, as the Viking woman sneaks through the forest.

Astrid walks softly, mindful of her feet, putting her weight on her hands from time to time as she ducks under a low-hanging branch that would have whipped back on her if she'd tried to push it aside. She calms her breathing and listens to the sounds of the forest that any hunter knows. She watches the way the sunlight glancing through the tree cover flows over the terrain, and sticks to the faint traces of animal tracks, and in this way she returns to the shoreline unheard and unseen.

Of course, she could have walked tall and clapped her hands and announced herself with a drum to keep the beat at the oars, for all the difference it would have made, because there is simply _no_ way to march four uncooperative Vikings and three reluctant dragons back to wherever Dagur has left his landing craft while his bigger ship plays decoy out on the horizon. Not quietly, or quickly. Not as rattled and overtired and stressed as the Berserkers clearly are. If the scorching on their armor and the broken calluses on their hands and the chips taken out of their blades are any sign, they've been in a fight or two and come off worse pretty recently.

And where does Dagur think he's taking them anyway?

From this distance it's a little harder to make out the details, but Astrid is pretty sure she can hear Ruffnut protesting the taking of her whistle.

"Remind me to take that off her myself, if she gets it back," she comments to Minnow, who whines. Only Astrid's hand on her harness holds her back from trying to get to Fishlegs, who stops short to lecture the soldiers surrounding him on something or other. When Astrid peeks out from the undergrowth, she sees him pointing to some detail of Stormfly, walking discontentedly beside him. Gronkles are unbelievably strong for their size, and even smaller-than-most Minnow could snap free of Astrid's touch in a moment, or drag her into the air or behind her across the ground helplessly, but she obeys.

She really is well-trained.

"And that is what Dagur doesn't understand," Astrid says to her. She's developed quite the habit of talking to dragons, for the surprise and joy of having them sometimes talk back now that she knows what to look and listen for. "That's what he hasn't seen – well, he has seen it, but he hasn't understood what he's seeing."

Astrid sets her free hand on her own hip, and glares. "It's not magic," she declares. "It's not. It's _work_."

Because dragons don't know how to live among humans. They have to be taught. They have to be taught things like _it's not okay to bite_ , _even when Vikings are being very annoying_.

All their dragons have been trained to behave even in the face of loud and shouting people.

A single command from Astrid, and the dragons stop being quite so patient. Honestly, she's surprised Fearsome has stuck to his training this long.

When she looks out again, it turns out that the ever-contrary Nightmare has decided that this is an excellent time to take a nap, and is suddenly asleep on the gravel and the sand. From the sound of it, Snotlout is choosing not to be helpful, and no one else is in a tearing hurry to kick a Monstrous Nightmare quite that big.

Dagur is loudly and clearly unhappy. It's a wonder they can't hear him in the village.

"All right," Astrid mutters. "This has been real fun. Let's not do it again sometime. But I've had just about enough of you."

She pulls her _own_ whistle from her pocket, and blows.

The sound of it – deeper and stronger than the little signal whistles the rest of her crew have; only Stoick has another whistle that sounds like this – rings out across the beach, and Stormfly's head comes up. Barf and Belch arch their necks back like angry snakes. Fearsome wakes up again in a big hurry. Beside her, Minnow growls a thunderous counterpoint to the signal.

It means _fight back_ , and it wasn't much fun teaching them that, and Astrid didn't feel all that good about it.

But Astrid will not see them taken again by people who treat dragons like tools and think they can conquer the world, and if that means teaching them that there are exceptions to every rule, even _this is home; play nice_ , then that's what she'll do.

Dragons are cleverer than Vikings ever gave them credit for. They'll figure it out.

And even as the sound of her whistle echoes back from the cliffs, the dragons that had submitted meekly enough to hurried snares and nets and loose chains start striking out, sending surprised Berserkers running. Dagur screams at them to hold their ground for once and at the dragons to stop that and at the sky for Astrid to show herself and apologize for not playing by his rules.

Minnow charges off to go rescue her Fishlegs, and Astrid follows along behind at a casual stroll.

All the fun is more or less over by the time she gets there, although Dagur leaves off chasing his soldiers and yelling – whether it's _come back and fight_ or _wait for me_ isn't quite clear – long enough to turn and shout, "Don't think you've won, Astrid! I'm gonna find them!"

His followers practically have to haul him away bodily, but soon enough a small flotilla of stealthy little rowboats puts out from a hidden cove and Dagur's stream of curses fades away beneath dragon roars.

Eventually, Astrid's crew gets their dragons calmed down again. The dragons are mostly just happy to be free of the various restraints hobbling their steps and fouling their wings, and can be tempted away from going after the ship on the horizon by being petted and fussed over and praised.

"You don't think he will, do you?" Fishlegs asks a little later, while Snotlout and the twins do a triumphant war dance to the accompaniment of Barf and Belch lurching from foot to foot, tongues panting and tails wagging. "Dagur, I mean – there's no way he can actually find Hiccup and Toothless, right?"

Stormfly is trying to knock her over, and Astrid side-steps another smothering pounce, lifting one hand to be nuzzled at instead. "He was still talking about them, huh?"

"Was he ever. Complete gibberish, but he sure wants to get his hands on them."

"Fastest way of losing your hands I've ever heard of," Astrid comments wryly. "He's not going to find them here, anyway. They're never here."

There must be something in her voice, because Fishlegs peers at her like he's worried about her. "You miss them," he says.

"What? No!"

Even as she speaks, Astrid reconsiders. She does, a little bit. She likes having them around even if they don't come any closer to the village than the cliffs. She likes watching Hiccup just exist, for the wonder of what he is, and seeing Toothless look at the world with intelligence in his eyes. "They'll come back when they're ready to be around humans again."

"And I guess they know to avoid Dagur now, if they already met him once," Fishlegs says, but he doesn't sound convinced.

"Sure," Astrid tries to reassure him. "They're clever. More than I can say for Dagur, right?"

Turning away to pet Stormfly until both of them calm down again, Astrid mutters, "Idiot. Stay off my island."

* * *

Back on his ship and just over the horizon, Dagur rests his chin in his hands and grins, leaning over the edge and chuckling to himself. He's scaring the crew, and entirely happy about that.

He'd wanted them to break and run at the first opportunity, but they didn't have to look quite so enthusiastic about it. He'll consider not screaming at them if they act like proper warriors when his plan starts being for real.

Astrid probably thinks she's beaten him – even in his own head, he doesn't think _again_. How adorable. He let her go. She'll take his message back whether she knows it or not, and then he and the Fury's rider – he and _Hiccup_ – can have a nice talk without the riffraff of Berk cluttering things up.

It's a _Night_ Fury, after all.

He doesn't expect it to come out during the day, not unless it's on a mission.

"Okay!" he says, snapping his fingers at the man pulling on one of the sail lines. "That's given them the scent of the bait. Let's get out of here!"

His warriors run to obey, and Dagur grins even wider.

"See you tonight, my friend," he says cheerfully. "Bring your pet."

* * *

 _To be continued._


	3. Chapter 3

**Part Three**

She who is Flies-in-Storms is dreaming of a sunset that is also a fish that bounces around on the end of a stick. The sun has fallen from the sky and was caught by a tree, and now it flops and thrashes and is very shiny. But then she is hiding among the darkness and thick-heavy heat of the fearful nest that was, and she has forgotten what the bright thing was, only that it has vanished into jaws that gape bigger and bigger to swallow mountains and gulp down oceans.

And still she does not wish to be woken by the squeaking and wailing and crying of small-cousins.

Small-cousins are like that. They are small but they think they are big, and they are too silly to understand that small things are not of interest to big dragons. They push and yowl loud and spread their wings as if they will grow big with trying, and they can only be stepped _over_ because they are not to be stepped _on_. They are still cousins.

Flies-in-Storms wakes into dreamlike darkness, and her tail bristles with spikes. But she does not snap it out to strike, because in the dream that would be a _very bad_ thing to do, and then the jaws would devour her. And in waking she knows that this is a safe nest, and it is hers because _strrrTT_ shifted aside to share.

It was a very good thing that her _strrrTT_ did, and Flies-in-Storms is grateful.

She was invited here, and the small-cousins were not. They claw at the walls and wail _unhappy us scared-angry want-to-fight unhappy us unhappy you c'mon c'mon c'mon angry!_ Flies-in-Storms hears small paws swatting small noses as they fight among themselves and crowd close, worrying at the ways into the nest that are shut now, held tight against them.

 _strrrTT_ likes it not at all when she has closed things but small paws make them open again, and when small-cousins dive in search of new toys and good games and then fly away shrieking.

 _Go-away_ , Flies-in-Storms says, growling _warning_ at them so close to her nest and her human. She crouches against the wood of the nest and turns her eye to a small crack. Through it she sees shadows of movement flitting all over outside in the night.

 _You?_ a small-cousin whistles a question, doubtful. _You you you you?_

Flies-in-Storms snorts at him. _What?_

Another one dives on him and knocks him aside into a cluster of small-cousins crouched on the ground and wailing all together, and they leap away aggrieved and quarreling. _Danger!_ the new one shrieks, waving his wings. _C'mon c'mon angry angry angry stranger-intruders don't-like angry us disgust angry!_ He spits and shakes himself, and beside him one like him squeaks angrily until she must yawn and the sounds mix together.

Not far away in the nest, there is a small grumbling sound and the _shuff_ noise that is not leaves but the movement of sleeping-nest things, and _strrrTT_ makes muffled human noises that mean complaining about small-cousins.

Flies-in-Storms crouches _unhappy_ and her eyes narrow _resentment_. _She_ is not supposed to wake up her human friend when she is sleeping, unless it is _very_ important, and it is not fair at all that small-cousins should demand that _strrrTT_ wake up and play with them if _she_ cannot.

She will have to make the small-cousins go away.

But they are out there and she is in here, and Flies-in-Storms puzzles, clucking softly. It is not a friendly thing to do, to break the nest open. If she had small clever paws like Shadow she could make the space in the wall be there neatly and gently, but she has only heavy claws.

Curiously, she noses at the opening-thing, trying to lift and flip it. She knows that when the opening-thing is holding tight to the metal piece, like the many small bright claws _strrrTT_ likes to put all over her cave with loud _thump thump thump_ strikings, then the space will not be open.

Flies-in-Storms wonders if she can persuade it to let go, and nudges at it like a stubborn hatchling who flops to the ground in the middle of things and will not move, and shrieks when it sees fangs shown to it because it knows it will not be bitten, and so must be persuaded elsewhere very cleverly.

Opening-things do not follow things to chase or to eat when those things are dangled before them, because they do not have noses. So Flies-in-Storms will have to push it gently.

She bumps her nose many times against the wood instead, whining very quiet.

There is a sound beside her of _confusion_ and _sleepiness_ and a little of _laughter_ , and _strrrTT_ pushes herself between the dragon and the stubborn opening-thing, big soft sleeping-in leaves trailing behind her like wings. She grumbles and paws at her eyes and her noises ask _curiosity_ about what Flies-in-Storms is doing.

But she makes the nest open so that the dragon can stalk out into the night.

It closes again on Flies-in-Storms' tail so quickly it almost bites, and the blue dragon turns back with the smallest whimper. Once she is outside at night, she cannot come back in again. That is the way of things.

She is bristling at being shut out even before small-cousins dive at her head and prance around her paws, screaming _outrage_ and _no no no no bad bad bad us upset very-much-so you c'mon danger danger!_ When she spreads her wings and flies up and around and around to perch on the top of the biggest human nest of all, that towers like a mountain, they follow her.

There are small-cousins all over now, cheeping and whining and yowling at her, but it is good a bit because _strrrTT_ will be glad that the small-cousins will not wake her again.

 _Listening_ , Flies-in-Storms invites finally, settling down and watching them carefully, head tipped to track their movements and to think.

They refuse to go back to their nests or play somewhere else. Small-cousins speak with very much silliness, but eventually Flies-in-Storms understands that they cannot go back to their cliffs and their shores and their forests and sleep like they want to, because there are humans stomping all over everything and swatting at them, and it is not fair, humans are not supposed to do that anymore! Humans are for feeding them good things and playing games and petting them now!

They complain very much about humans doing wrong things and chasing them away.

Flies-in-Storms growls, remembering the humans earlier, that did not belong here, that were trespassers, that trapped and howled and threatened. She knows that flock by their scent because she has smelled it many times now. She knows their fidgeting like they know they are doing something they should not, and their sharp things pointed at her and the others who fly with her _strrrTT_ 's friends. She knows the shrieking noises of their Alpha who tells them _fight fight fight fight_ always and waves his paws like he is trying to fly.

 _strrrTT_ very much does not trust that one, and Flies-in-Storms was happy to chase him today. He has _nets_.

He catches dragons and pokes sharp things at them and their friends like they are prey to be pinned on claws. He stalks with high steps and staring and with his fangs bared, like a thief who knows he should not be in a place, but who is excited to be caught and to fight. He challenges others to scold him with his movements, impressed with his own daring.

Dragons who move that way like to make trouble. They race towards fights among others and pounce in and bite everyone all the same, and they must be bitten many times until they learn not to do that.

It does not surprise her at all that the Nets Man has not learned he is not wanted here.

Maybe no one will bite the Nets Man because he is an Alpha. To bite an Alpha is a thing _very_ difficult and nervous-making to think of. But there is no roar inside her skull of rage and hate and killing-crushing in punishment for thinking it, and Flies-in-Storms would like to growl at the Nets Man more.

Perhaps _strrrTT_ will not mind so much, although it is not good to growl at humans on this new nest island. She must wait for the sound that means _permission_ before she snarls and snaps and slashes at humans. Humans do not make sense sometimes, so it is good to have a signal that is easy to understand.

Perhaps _strrrTT_ will be happy anyway. Flies-in-Storms would like to make her friend happy.

Her friend is the best human. She is small but she thinks she is big inside, like the small-cousins but _better_ because she is not annoying. She pesters sometimes when she has a new thought, but she looks for signals that mean _enough_ , and then she steps away and her paws pet instead of commanding. She learns things when Flies-in-Storms teaches them to her, even when Flies-in-Storms must teach her many times and be patient.

Flies-in-Storms has no hatchlings of her own, but she has a _strrrTT_ , which is strange and startling but in a good way.

And she is kind. She was kind when there had only been hurting and aloneness for a long time.

She _tries_.

 _strrrTT_ made gentler and happy sounds when she came to learn to play games instead of to fight, and it was a good thing for the dragon who had no sounds and no one to play with and was afraid always. It made her warm inside to hear happy sounds again. There were no other happy sounds to remember before. They are Flies-in-Storms' favorite happy sounds that she knows best now.

 _strrrTT_ gave Flies-in-Storms sounds of her own, and she always returns for her even when they are surrounded by terrible humans and frightening-staring fierce dragons, and she stays with her when she is scared, and she shares her nest. _strrrTT_ brings her good things to eat and scratches her nose. They teach each other new games.

She is not _like us_ , Flies-in-Storms knows. She is not _one of us_ , not as Darkness and Shadow are, or as the ones who do not live among human nests are.

But Flies-in-Storms loves her friend very much. Her _strrrTT_ is hers, and not to be bullied.

Flies-in-Storms would not let a dragon who had bullied a friend return to frighten and trap and threaten them again. She will not let _that_ one – she rattles her wings and shifts away from the imagined Nets Man nervously, like trembling, but with _disdain_ in the flick of her wingtips and the twitch of her tail, like _strrrTT_ says with her body and her voice to the Nets Man always – forget his scolding and creep back very pleased with himself.

He should slink away yowling instead.

The small-cousins have bewailed themselves _ignored_ while Flies-in-Storms works through the problem very cleverly all by herself, and stalked away _offended_ looking for someone else to complain to.

That is better. No one will listen curiously if Flies-in-Storms comes to them with small-cousins clamoring for attention at her tail, because to play the senseless games of small-cousins is for silly dragons and for hatchlings who do not know any better.

 _Where?_ Endurance, dozing beneath a rolling thing, rumbles when she alights beside him. He raises his head and looks all around. _No-threat not-worried,_ he says.

 _C'mon,_ Flies-in-Storms insists, spreading her wings, showing that the danger is elsewhere, that they must fly to find it. _Enemy-intruder_ , she growls, crouching and prowling to show that the danger is _sneaky_. And she stands very sure and raises her head and insists.

Paws Slip is sleeping on the edge of a cliff with his tail falling away off the stones into the sky, and with Tailchaser sprawled over her friend's back so that he will not shift in his sleep and fall again. Flies-in-Storms nudges them awake and hovers above their resting place as she clicks and growls her warning, and they growl to each other and fly after her when she turns away.

She finds Scar Like Lightning chewing on his claws that grow ragged and long, and whistles invitingly, promising pouncing and chasing games.

Snap-and-Sulk do not like thinking of enemies coming to threaten them. Their favorite humans have a small new hatchling that they will be allowed to play with someday if they are _very_ careful and _very_ good, and already they are quarreling with each other often about which of them will be liked by the small new one most.

And others hear them moving about and wake, or look up from slinking through the human nest and chattering together, quietly so as not to wake up humans and be shouted at. It is not at all fair, to be shouted at, because then humans are louder than dragons, but humans are very silly often and dragons must be patient with them, because it is better to be shouted at a bit than to fight always.

Flies-in-Storms flies beside Friend and Colors Like Mine as dragons growl to each other and their flock gathers in the sky above the human nests and across the top of the biggest nest. Clicking and arguing and worrying, they soar in tight and hovering spirals that scatter when the small-cousins dart upwards to join them and scream with delight at having a whole flock together to complain to.

 _Bad!_ Paws Slip warns, pulling his claws back. He does not want to pounce at humans. _They –_ he glances downwards at the small fires still burning, and shrinks in on himself in a cringe – _angry!_

 _No_ , Flies-in-Storms argues. _Approval_ , she says with her body, and _they_ with the same glance, and purrs _proud_.

She knows that they are not supposed to fight with humans. But those humans are different, and trespassing.

This is a nest for dragons too, now, and dragons do not let strangers trespass in their places that they have claimed.

 _Curious_ , Endurance croons, and all around him others take up the sound.

Content with that and glad that they are all going together, Flies-in-Storms follows the others as they turn away to find a wind that takes them across the island. Small-cousins swarm among them and scream _excitement_ and _fierce_ and puff themselves out with _bragging_ as they make small pretend-dives at pretend-enemies, even when bigger dragons snort _small you hush silly small_ at them.

* * *

Near the shore there is a bright splotch of light all lit up by small fires, burning in pits dug into the ground, and held up high on branches planted where humans have placed them, or held in human paws. That ground shines like daylight while all the island otherwise and the sea beyond are still night-dark, as if the sun is theirs to bask in and they will not share.

Within it, the Nets Man walks with his head high and his feet striking the ground to hurt it. Firelight glances from an eye stick, flashing like a glare, that he points at the sky. He lunges and pounces with a long blade that shines, and his voice leaps out into the night mocking and taunting and eager, singing to himself of excitement and hunger-to-hurt.

His many flock-followers scuttle around him with their shoulders low, or stand staring and guarding with sharp things ready.

There is a good smell of food there, rich and burning and very tempting, and some of the flock lift their noses and breathe deeply, licking at their jaws.

 _No no no no stupid-silly you danger-warning,_ cry Snap-and-Sulk, bumping the hungry dragons with their heads and turning them away from the good smells.

The small-cousins dive away shrieking with fear, reminded of what they had run away from. They forget the big dragons around them and disappear into the forest to hide.

 _That?_ Fastest Hunter whistles curiously, from his perch in a tall grasping tree. He untangles himself from the branches and rears up to greet the go-and-see flock that has come to join him. _Wondering humans there humans why? worried strange don't-like_.

Nose In Air is resting in the branches of another tree, peering through the forest at the light. _Careful,_ she chirrups a warning, and points with her heavy nose at a shadow dark even for the forest at night under the chewed-on moon. When Flies-in-Storms turns her wings into the wind and soars all around it, hunting for scents, she catches the smell of a stranger-intruder human belonging to the Nets Man. He waits to pounce out from the night, smelling all of fear and stink-sweat and old ocean and bright metal and old meat.

Springing up from their trees to join the flock, Fastest Hunter and Nose In Air click _anxiety_. They do not like that the humans are there – it is strange for humans to be moving around and hiding in the forest after dark. But there are many strangers, and they and all dragons here were told _**no more fighting**_ , and that command is strong, so they have not leapt to drive the humans away.

Flies-in-Storms looks at the bright patch with fires all over as she sets her wings to glide and hover, and a tremble for real runs through her from her heart-fires to the tips of her wings and out to her tail. A place all lit up in the night is easy to jump at.

She jumped at a place all lit up once, with fires all over. She jumped at it hunting prey-scents with a flock around her.

And she was caught.

Her wing and her flank hurt very much at first, and there was only nothing except the small cave. She hurt, and she healed, but still there was nothing. There was only night always and cave always with no sky, and stale air, and dead food, and boredom worse than any winter, just to crouch and stare at nothing. Sometimes there was a bright open space that was a _lie_ because it was a trap with rattling chains above. Then she would stretch her wings and cry out at the hurting in them and in rage at the humans who bit at her with sharp things until she turned and fled back to her darkness and the nothing. She listened sometimes to the whimpering of _despair_ in other trap-caves until that whimpering became screaming and the sounds of thrashing that was only madness and helplessness to not be mad. She learned that dragons scream when they have nothing left but madness.

And then there would be human fierce sounds, and the smell of blood, and then the mad-from-trapped screaming would stop forever.

Places all lit up are not to be jumped at blindly.

The eyes of her friends turn to look at her as some of them grumble and snarl _recognition_ , because the Nets Man has pounced at their nest before and been chased away. They glide around each other soaring safe in the darkness, like death-hunting birds that were good to follow when the beating of _**Hungry!**_ inside was strong and there was no good hunting, and the dragon who was not yet Flies-in-Storms knew she must find food or be punished and eaten.

She knew what to do, then. But she does not know what to do now.

She wishes very much that her friends who are here sometimes were here now. They have sounds that they make for each other and that _strrrTT_ tries to make but says wrongly, but Flies-in-Storms thinks of them as a mixture of _dark_ and _strange_ and _defiant_ and _fighters_ and _liberators,_ so together they are the Dauntless Ones.

But also they are one and the other, Darkness like shed scales from the night sky left to gleam in the daylight, and Shadow who is Darkness' Shadow. Shadow does not look quite like Darkness, but Shadow is of him, which is as it should be. _Her_ shadow does not look quite like her mostly. It is a shape a bit different, but it is hers.

Flies-in-Storms does not think she is clever, not like Shadow is, and she does not fly quick and fearless like Darkness. The Dauntless Ones would know what to do, and they would be very brave, and dragons would follow them if they asked.

Sometimes they are here because it is a New Strange Thing, that humans and dragons should live together, and they do not trust it. They are wary, and they watch from hiding as if it were a bear that does not threaten nowbut could do, or as if they were a mother turning her eggs to warm all over beside her.

Perhaps Flies-in-Storms and the flock should go and look for them, she thinks, recoiling from the light of many humans gathered to trespass. Darkness and Shadow are not at ease among the human nests, so they hunt and bask and wander elsewhere on this island, in wild places where they are happier. Dragons can find them there but humans cannot, and then humans walk about calling and scratching at their heads that there are no dragons in their nests.

Then they have all flown away to perch and chatter and groom and listen and purr and curl up together, with the Dauntless Ones nudging at their scales and chirruping curiously to be _sure_ that they are safe among their new friends.

She could go and look for them, and bring this baffling thing to them as she once brought prey to the SHE. Flies-in-Storms is not happy to look for trouble to hunt. She is not as much a fighter.

It has not been in her to look at a thing, and decide that it is a wrong thing, and that it shall not be so, and that she shall _make_ it not be so, and that she will fight to make it not be so.

It is in the Dauntless Ones to do so, to choose and stand and fight, and to change what is. It is in _strrrTT_ to guide with her paws and her voice and to show her when to strike, because Flies-in-Storms trusts her _strrrTT,_ who is an Alpha among her small flock of flyers and pads at the side of the Alpha of all her flock listening to his sounds and learning to hunt from him.

But Flies-in-Storms does not like it when _strrrTT_ is upset, and the Nets Man had made _strrrTT_ very upset. The Nets Man threatened them all, and he does not listen.

She imagines one day when the Dauntless Ones return to perch with them and watch warily and chatter curiously and guard against what _might_ be. She would be very proud to tell them of a time when she was a bit like them.

Flies-in-Storms knows many leaders. Maybe she can lead, too. There is no one to tell her not to.

She rattles her wings and she cries out _attention!_ , callingto her flock, and if she burns inside at their eyes turned to her it is only the heart-fire in her chest flaring to be breathed out.

 _Ours_ , she says, spreading her wings over the island below, the island that became their home when they did not know where else to go, and is a good place. She claims it. It is theirs.

It is a place for dragons, and for humans who can learn to play better games with them.

 _Those,_ she gestures, snarling _don't-like_ and _danger_ and _enemies_ and _rejection_ , those are _not!_

And she shrieks high and challenging the warning that means _intruders!_ and that calls on the flock to turn on the invaders and chase them away.

Far below, humans startle and stare up into the night, but Flies-in-Storms is not there. She knows not to leap blindly, and instead she has turned and flown away, remembering a new game.

Her flock follows her as she leads.

* * *

Nose In Air grumbles _don't-understand confusion don't-like why? why? don't-understand don't-want-to_ and scratches at her underbelly with her claws, looking away and ignoring the new thing.

 _Look!_ Endurance chirrups to her, pushing her with his shoulder until she must put her paw down and stare at him. He beats his wings and hovers with the stone in his claws, and drops it a very short way to crash near her.

Nose In Air leaps and startles, fluttering away, and Endurance laughs in a lolling tongue and quick sharp grunts and deep-inside gurglings like a hungry stomach. He is smaller than she, but he has scared her with the stone.

 _Approval,_ Flies-in-Storms purrs to him, and he preens as she hops to pounce on a stone and lift it in her claws.

 _Fly us,_ she shows. _Fly rocks._ And _careful careful attack pounce chase us hunt!_

Snap-and-Sulk chatter to each other _excitement-excitement yes yes yes good laughter-laughter_ , and wave their wings, jaws gaping. They leap at the piles of stones that Flies-in-Storms and the others who fly with humans on their backs put here in the daylight, catching a stone in their paws like prey, and they bite at the small pieces that are crushed underfoot beneath the many dragons crouching in the clearing. Their cheeks puff out all full of small stones, and their eyes flash _laughing at_ their flock-mates who coil around the wood that _strrrTT_ and her flyers put here and perch in the trees.

Flies-in-Storms cheeps _surprise_ that they have had such a good idea.

 _Us!_ a small-cousin shrieks, diving into the clearing. Many more follow and they tumble through the small stones, snatching at the pieces and fluttering around under the feet of the flock. _Us fight us fight us fight us fight this-rock here this-rock good mine this-rock!_ They squabble with each other over the pieces and do not stop until Mud Slider stomps very close to their waving tails, stepping _ashamed_ a bit that the silly small-cousins are more ready to fight than he.

 _Me_ , he offers, small wings humming, and he lifts a heavy stone from the ground.

One by one the dragons understand what they are to do, as Flies-in-Storms stalks around and around and pushes them at the stones and shows them many times that they do not _have_ to dive flaming and screaming at intruders. There is fire there already, and shouting. But rocks are quiet.

It was a good thought that _strrrTT_ had, to be so clever, and it is a clever thought that Flies-in-Storms has had, to steal it.

It will frighten the intruders very much, to have rocks fall from the sky.

So Flies-in-Storms beats her wings and calls _follow!_ and carries her stone high above the trees back to the bright place on the shoreline. Her flock flies beside her in her wake, calling to each other in small yelps and aggrieved grumbles and doubtful snorts until they are close to the bright place.

Below, the Nets Man paces and stares and waits, shouting at shadows. All of him says _challenge_ loud and obvious, even though he is small and far below. The not-belonging scents of his flock are sharp on the wind.

She imagines _strrrTT_ on her shoulders making sounds that mean _ready-waiting_ and then the sound that means _attack!_ But _strrrTT_ is not here. She is sleeping knowing her friend will protect her.

So instead Flies-in-Storms cries _attack!_ as dragons do, and swoops down towards the light, and lets the rock go, and at once soars upwards again, diving away. She does not see the rock fall, but she hears a howl of _outrage_ and _shock_ and _fear_ , and then many, many angry human sounds. And close behind there are many _thud_ _thud thud_ sounds as her friends drop their stones too and they crash to the ground among the small _thwip thwip thwipthwipthwip_ noises of small pieces spat out or dropped from tiny paws.

If they do not flame brightly, humans cannot see them, and then humans cannot put them in nets!

Paws Slip flutters up beside her, and Scar Like Lightning spins excitedly, and Nose In Air looks still-doubtfully at her empty claws. The small-cousins turn themselves into tangled-up streaks of racing color barely to be seen in the light from below that wavers and flaps about as humans run into burning sticks and wave them and make all the shadows dance.

Down below there is angry screaming, but up in the night sky there are chirrups and whistles and croons and yelping as dragons laugh, to see the stranger-intruders run confused.

Tailchaser whistles _like good game this game yes like ready ready!_ and darts off to catch more stones. Mud Slider and Endurance and This-Splotch-and-That-Splotch follow her.

Nose In Air snorts _silliness_ and flutters away towards the forest too, and Flies-in-Storms hovers watching as the flock scatters to find new ways to chase intruders away.

The Nets Man runs after his followers who have run away and pulls them by their ears and their noses back to the light. He pushes sharp things into their paws and waves his blade at the sky yelling very loud and angry. But the dragons hiding in the night will not answer his invitation to come out and fight – that is what his sounds say – and when no shriek answers his, instead he crouches as if hunting, ready to pounce.

Tailchaser and her friends come back with more rocks and broken branches and paws full of mud scooped from the banks of streams. Rocks fall like hailstones, and they dive away as sharp arrows fly and miss. Flies-in-Storms and Colors Like Mine flick their tails around and scatter spikes at them in reply. Small-cousins dart everywhere, shrieking in high piercing voices at the great new game that they have learned. One stops and hovers near Flies-in-Storms' nose, tail waving as it grins happily. _Good good good fun fun_ , it chatters, and flits away.

Movement far below is Nose In Air, soaring low with something writhing in her claws. But all the eyes of the intruders are turned upwards, some holding eye sticks and some holding arrow throwers. So she is not seen as she veers close to the light and tosses her catch into the sand.

It skids and sprawls and makes a great plume of sand like sea spray, and when it stops Flies-in-Storms sees that it is a stranger-intruder who was hiding, waiting to pounce with leaves and sticks all caught in his skins to make him look like forest.

 _Again again,_ Nose In Air suggests, circling up to the soaring flock. They greet her with chattering and purring and whistles, and she spreads her wings proudly. She cries a sound that means _good hunting_ , that invites others to fly with her and feed on many prey.

But they do not hunt prey-beasts tonight – humans are not for eating. They hunt a good game of finding and catching as if they are chasing after hatchlings too silly not to run off edges, and Friend and Bared Teeth and many others fly away with her to creep careful and sneaking through the forest looking for hiding intruders, to pounce on and snatch up and carry away most firmly.

Some of them are dropped in the water instead.

They make good splashes.

But still the Nets Man does not go away. He only shouts louder and louder and gets very angry until he is spitting and screaming at his followers and pacing in his own pawprints around and around. His blade bites at sand and at stones and all his sounds tangle together. Flies-in-Storms cannot understand why he does not understand to go away.

There are nastier things that could be dropped on him, but it is not a tidy thing to do.

Some of the dragons who have been carrying heavy stones have landed to rest on the plains on the edge of the forest, licking at their claws and stretching their wings. They whine and chirp and call softly to each other, curious and concerned, and click with thinking about new games.

In a quiet moment while dragons hover and humans huddle, one of their cries rings out clearly.

The Nets Man leaps into the air like a spike has bitten his paws, and he lands with his blade hunting for the sound. He gathers his followers all around him and shouts at them. He stomps his feet and he points out into the night.

Some of his followers stay in the firelight staring around very fearfully, but the Nets Man crouches with _hunting_ and prowls towards the sounds. Some of them go with him, stepping all over each other's paws and clumping together before they disappear in the dark.

The dragons above howl _disappointed angry confused angry worry disappointed outraged_ that their good trick has not worked, and Flies-in-Storms ruffles her spines in embarrassment.

She did not want to dive at the intruders and threaten them and bite and flame. But this is her place and her flock will not let trespassers stay here to hunt their flock-mates.

 _Follow!_ she cries, even though some of her friends look at her with _doubt_ in their signals, and she flies quickly.

Soaring, Flies-in-Storms dives over the scent of the humans and spins, landing between her resting friends and the stranger-intruders. _Danger!_ she whistles to her flock-mates, calling _here here here me help danger fight defend mine mine_ in a rattling snarl.

And it is _good good happy safe happy sure warm-inside safe good_ when all of her flock-mates follow her, landing with rustling wings and bubbling snarls and flashing teeth, to stand in the way of the trespassers.

The resting dragons climb to their paws and race to join them, pushing their shoulders and scraping their sides together, protecting each other. They growl low and ready, small flames flickering in their jaws and their eyes bright.

It is not even silly when the small-cousins turn up again and land on all their shoulders and perch on their heads, puffing out their small chests and spreading their wings like they are _very_ tall just because they are on top of tall dragons like Snap-and-Sulk.

The shadows that are the Nets Man and his followers stop at the sound of growls and the fluttering of wings and the scraping of claws against stones. The Nets Man says a sound, and a _scratch-scratch_ noise makes a flame.

A fire branch lights up, and another, and others, until there is fire-light again. It shines from the scales of many dragons guarding their island, shoulders braced, wings spread, horns lowered, fangs bared, hindquarters tensed to leap, all gathered in a wide scoop that leaves the trespassers nowhere to run but back to the sea.

In the light, the Nets Man stares with _disbelief_ in his eyes and in his voice when he raises it to shout at them. He yells sounds that mean _go away!_ He waves his blade and a fire stick that he snatches from one of his followers.

They do _not_ go away, and Flies-in-Storms growls low and threatening, and the voices of her friends echo her.

There are many, many dragons here, and this is _their place!_

The Nets Man takes a very small step backwards, and Flies-in-Storms leaps a very little way forwards, and again the flock follows her.

She does not understand any of the sounds that the Nets Man makes, only that he is not happy to see them – _that_ is fine – and that he is not sure he wants to fight with them all. There is _uncertainty_ in his movements.

He looks from side to side and waves his fire stick, as if he is searching for something he cannot find, and stares up at the sky again. He throws the stick to the ground, and it sputters in the grass. He stomps on it, jumping up and down very angry, and waves his paws at the night. He bares his fangs with what looks like _disgust_.

And at last, he spits many sounds that mean _no_ and _don't-want._ He turns his back on them and stalks away, yelling.

Flies-in-Storms recognizes the sound _strrrTT_ and maybe even the sounds that mean Darkness and Shadow, which is very strange and probably not so. She does not know all the sounds that humans make, only some.

But she knows the sounds and the signals in humans that mean _giving up_ , and the Nets Man is saying _giving up_ very loudly, and she shrieks _triumph_ as his followers turn and run after him. Their fires go up and down and up and down with their stumbling until they run into the ocean and fall over when the water pulls at their paws and drowns their fire sticks.

All around her, her flock howls exultantly. Fires bright and colorful burn into the night and up at the stars, licking out towards the retreating intruders who _must_ know now not to come here. Her friends leap into the air and fly all around and prance with paws waving and tails wagging. Tailchaser pounces on everyone else's tails. They even purr at the small-cousins who strut around saying _pride pride pride us best us biggest us strongest yes yes yes!_

Scar Like Lightning and Friend and Fastest Hunter fly after the intruders to make sure that they go away for real and far away this time in their big ship and its small hatchlings. Endurance butts his head against her side in excitement while Paws Slip pounces at imaginary enemies and rolls batting at the air. Mud Slider swats at him and they wrestle and tumble into Nose In Air, who steps away quorking _resigned_. Colors Like Mine tries to shriek louder than Snap-and-Sulk although Snap-and-Sulk is _two_ throats so they can be very loud.

Flies-in-Storms squints her eyes closed and purrs and imagines _strrrTT_ being very proud of her for protecting their home.

Now she has a nest to share, and a friend like a hatchling to care for, and a flock that belongs here, _and_ a story all her own to tell in the perching-together when Darkness and Shadow return.

She is part of things, and she is home, and she is the happiest dragon of _all_.

* * *

 _-end-_

 _thanks for reading – Le'letha_


End file.
